American Desperado (14 page)

J
.
R
.:
Carlo Gambino and my uncle Joe were both in their seventies. To me, these men were ancient, like statues in the park. I met Carlo Gambino the first time when I was fourteen or fifteen. My uncle Joe took me to his house in Queens after my mother died. When we went in, I had to shake Gambino’s hand, and Carlo Gambino told me I had grown. I guess he had seen me before when I was very little. Or maybe that’s what he always said when he met kids of the guys who worked for him. My memory of that meeting was mostly of how stuffy his house was.

When I came up with the idea of getting into the nightclub business, Gambino gave me one of his top young guys to work with, Andy Benfante. Andy was a very trusted guy. For six years he had worked as Carlo Gambino’s personal driver and bodyguard. Now we were cut loose to find good businesses to take a piece of.
There were dozens of soldiers running around putting the squeeze on different establishments. Andy and I were given free rein as long as we didn’t take over any place that was already controlled by somebody else and start a war.

Andy was nearly thirty when we started. I was not yet twenty-one, but I had seen him around for years. When I was a kid, I looked up to him like a big brother. Now he was my partner. That gave me confidence, like having Steve watching over me in Vietnam. The first day Andy and I talked about working together, he said, “Jon, I know you’re strong because of who your father is, but everybody knows I got Carlo Gambino. So whatever the fuck you want to do, don’t worry about it.”

If anybody on the street had a problem with me, they had to take it to Andy. And from Andy it went to Gambino. Everybody knew that. There was a flip side to the deal, too. The family wasn’t going to let me run on the streets for free anymore. From now on, anything I did, even a drug rip-off, when I made a score, I had to pay a cut to Andy, who pushed this up the ladder. You pay the tax up to the family because kicking some money into the bucket now will buy protection for any problem that might come down the road later on.

My uncles were glad I was with Andy because in their minds Andy was going to look after me and keep me out of trouble. But what nobody understood was, Andy was a wild guy.

Andy called himself the “new breed of Italian.” He didn’t dress like other soldiers in the family. He wore open silk shirts, expensive shoes, gold chains, nice watches. He was into getting high, partying in the clubs, and fucking a young blonde one day, a young brunette the next. He liked Motown music and rock, the same as I did. I could relate to Andy.

The first night we really hung out together, he said, “Let’s do some coke.”

This freaked me out, because I still thought of him as the older guy I’d see with my uncles. Their generation—what we called “mustache Italians”—would all be sitting in Little Italy sipping coffee,
and if you mentioned drugs, they’d smack you. That’s how straight the Mafia was. It didn’t matter that they’d been importing heroin from France since my father’s time—soldiers were not supposed to get high.

So when Andy brought up coke, I worried he was trying to trick me. I said, “Drugs? No way.”

Andy laughed at me. “Fuck that shit, man. Let’s get high.”

Andy was unique. He was completely loyal to Gambino, but he didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought of him. I loved that about Andy. He drove a big Lincoln Continental, pimped out with extra chrome and the fake spare tire in the back, not because he thought it was a good car but because it was a ridiculous car. He did a lot of shit just to make himself laugh.

As soon as we started working together, Andy said, “We need to get you some nice clothes, man.”

He took me to a shop called Granny Takes a Trip.
^*
It was a crazy place where rock stars went to get dressed. They sold everything—wild, psychedelic silk pullovers, cashmere sweaters, velvet pants. Andy turned me on to a guy in the store who made custom boots by measuring your whole leg. The boots he made you were skintight and went up past your knees. That was the style. The leather was in patches of different colors, like yellow, white, green, and orange. The heels must have been four inches high.

Normal wiseguys looked at Andy and me like we were nuts. We went to a restaurant dressed like this with Gambino and my uncle Joe, and my uncle Joe got uptight. He made a comment to me about my boots. Andy said, “Jon and me have to dress like this. We’re in the nightclub business. We need to blend in. We can’t dress like hicks from New Jersey.”

Andy would always stick up for me. When I got into trouble with older wiseguys, Andy would always say. “Jon, don’t worry
about it. When the sit-down comes, I’ll lie through my fucking teeth for you, bro.”

When Andy defended me to the family, he’d always say, “What do you want me to do about Jon? The kid’s crazy.”

The reality was, Andy was the one always putting shit up his nose, waking up every day with a new scheme. That’s what made him ideal for the nightclub business. In the late 1960s, the owners, promoters, and in clubs were changing so fast, the family needed guys like me and Andy out roaming around, looking for opportunities.

T
HE FIRST
thing me and Andy did together was start hanging out at Maxwell’s Plum. This was a restaurant on the Upper East Side where all the beautiful people went before and after hitting the nightclubs.
^*
The owners of Maxwell’s Plum were already paying a cut of their money to someone else in the Gambino family, so Andy and I could not take it over. But we went there to learn. We spent a little money and got friendly with the people who worked there. You could learn a lot from the people who worked at bars and restaurants. A maître d’ at Maxwell’s was a degenerate gambler. We helped him out with some loans. He turned us on to Alice’s, a restaurant on the East Side that was doing good business but didn’t have any Mafia control.

Alice’s was a joint with great hamburgers. It looked like a nothing place, but it got the same crowd as Maxwell’s. It was owned by a man named Hampton Smith.
^†
Andy and I offered Hampton a down payment of $10,000 to buy him out. He didn’t want to sell because we’d offered a ridiculous deal, but he had no choice.
That was the power of working with Andy. Our first month out, we bought a restaurant.

As soon as we bought it, one of our waiters came to us and said, “There’s rats in the basement.”

We went down there, and the rats were the size of small dogs. We told the waiter, “After we close tonight, bring some chairs down here. Bring a bunch of cheese.”

Me and Andy had the waiter throw the cheese all over the floor and put the lights out. We all sat in the dark, listening. When we heard the rats going
eek eek eek
, we told the waiter, “Flip the light switch.”

As soon as he does, Andy and I take pistols and shotguns and blast the rats. There’s bullets, pieces of rat flying everywhere. The surviving rats scurry away. We stop shooting. The waiter is standing there in the smoke, nearly pissing himself. We tell him, “Okay, asshole. Turn off the lights. We’re doing it again.”

Me and Andy loved that shit. Anytime we got bored, we’d take a waiter down there with us for rat patrol. That’s how we’d amuse ourselves.

A
T
A
LICE’S
I’d get friendly with the customers. In the late 1960s, you couldn’t tell if a kid in dirty dungarees was a millionaire or a bum. Everybody dressed the same. I met some kids with long hair and jean jackets who wanted to buy some pot. I told them I knew someone who could help them out. Then I set them up for a rip-off with Jack Buccino.

When I ran this past Andy, he had no problem with it. “As long as I get my cut.”

So we ran the scheme. I introduced the hippies to Jack Buccino. He ripped them off. I gave a cut to Andy. Everybody was happy.

Then the hippies returned to the restaurant and told me to give back their money. I said, “Fuck you.”

As they left, I noticed these hippies had come on motorcycles. Back then, I didn’t know much about the Hell’s Angels. I’d seen
them in movies. But I didn’t know the hippies I’d set up were Hell’s Angels.

A few nights later, after I closed the restaurant, the Hell’s Angels rolled up. They started banging on the door. I’m not scared to fight anybody, but not twenty fucking guys. This was a losing situation. I called Andy. He said, “Let them bang on the doors. I’ll take care of it.”

Half an hour later two refrigerator trucks pulled up outside. My whole life my uncles bragged about their “meat guys”—the union meatpackers loyal to the family. This night I finally saw them in action. These guys piled off the trucks. These were three-, four-hundred-pound men who spent their lives throwing around dead cows. These were people who I didn’t believe really existed. They were like an army of pro wrestlers. They wore bloody coveralls. They carried meat hooks and baseball bats. They surrounded the Hell’s Angels.

The fight wasn’t even close. The meat guys rioted on the Hell’s Angels. They clubbed the Angels. They fucked up their bikes with their meat hooks. For them, it was probably less work fucking up a Hell’s Angel than it was throwing around a frozen cow.

That night I truly understood the logic of working with the family. I watched the Hell’s Angels get their asses stomped and thought,
There’s nobody I can’t do something to
.

I
HAD
enjoyed smoking weed since I was a kid. Andy did too, but he had a special kind he smoked. He got weed with elephant tranquilizers mixed in. Now they call it PCP. We smoked it twenty-four hours a day, and I guarantee you, it made us lose our fucking minds.

Sometimes we did things under the influence of PCP that were not the brightest things to do. We had a little problem with Hampton, the man we’d bought Alice’s from. We were supposed to pay him off in installments for the restaurant. But as soon as we got the papers from him, Andy said, “Fuck this guy. He’s nothing. We ain’t going to pay him another dime.”

Hampton had a friendship with John Gotti
^*
that we didn’t know about. Back then John Gotti was not yet prevalent. People knew who he was, but there were ten guys like him.

When Hampton went crying to Gotti about how we stole his restaurant, Gotti decided to take his side against us. His end of it would be to get a cut of what we would pay Hampton, or maybe he’d take over Alice’s from us.

Gotti and Andy and I were all part of the Gambino family. Normally, to settle a dispute between guys like us, we would go to the old mustache guys, and they would have a sit-down. But when Gotti came to talk to me and Andy, we were wacked out on PCP. We told him, “Fuck bringing this to the family. We’ll settle this ourselves.”

Since Gotti was young and crazy like us, he agreed. A few days later he told me and Andy to meet him at a metal shop in Brooklyn. The day of the meeting Andy and me smoked a bunch of PCP. Andy had a sunroof in his Lincoln. I remember driving through midtown Manhattan looking up at the buildings and telling him, “Drive faster, bro. Come on, before the buildings tilt down and melt on us.”

We had shotguns, pistols, machine guns in the car, and I thought the city was melting.

The building Gotti picked to meet us in was a metal shop. There were workers grinding steel rods, sparks flying. I’m tripping out on the lights. At the end of the main room was a big metal door that opened onto a staircase to the basement. Gotti had a guy at the door. He says, “Down here.”

Andy and I brought some Outcasts for backup—Petey and Dominic and a couple more. We go in the metal door, down a metal staircase. There’s nothing in the basement. No windows. A couple of boxes. Gotti’s got six of his guys. Me and Andy got ours. We’re dressed in our velvet shirts from Granny Takes a Trip. Dominic’s got on his tie-dyed hippie shit. Andy and I are wacked out on elephant tranquilizers. Dominic and Petey are strung out on heroin. What a gang we are.

But all of us have guns. And all of Gotti’s guys got guns, too. Gotti comes up to Andy and says, “What do you got?”

“What do you mean, what do we got?” Andy says.

“You owe Hampton for the restaurant, and Hampton is my friend,” Gotti says.

We stand there facing Gotti and his guys. There’s no rules in the basement. We all have guns, but our sides are even. If one side shoots, everybody’s dead. This balance is what keeps everybody reasonable.

Then the door at the top of the stairs opens, and twenty guys come down. They are all there to back up Gotti.

P
ETEY
:
I was right behind Jon in that basement. I was calm because I was on heroin, but I was cognizant. I had no worries that we controlled the situation. But when I saw the door open and all the meatheads pile into the basement, I thought,
This is going to turn out really bad
.

J
.
R
.:
It turned out Gotti had his meat guys, too. He set us up. Now, it’s us against twenty of Gotti’s guys. After all the shit I survived in Vietnam, the last place I want to die is a basement in Brooklyn. A basement is a terrible place to die in.

Fear starts to clear my mind. I reason if Andy and I back down and agree to pay money for the restaurant, we’ll be finished on the
streets. We have to say no to Gotti. It would be crazy of him to kill us, but we don’t know him very well. When people get their backs up, they can do stupid things. If we make him look weak in front of his guys, he might lose all his reason.

Andy doesn’t even look at all the meat guys. He steps closer to Gotti and says, “Your friend Hampton is a piece of shit. He’s a rat. He ain’t getting a dime from us.”

“He’s a rat?” Gotti says.

“Ask around,” Andy says.

Gotti’s face doesn’t show if he believes Andy or not. But by telling him that he is defending a rat—a man who is snitching to the cops—Andy has given Gotti an out. He can let us walk out of there without giving him a dime, but his face will be saved.